Full-Spectrum Marketing Blog

15 Pieces of Data You Can Learn From the New Twitter Audience Insights

Here’s some exciting news for marketers: late in May, Twitter rolled out a new Audience Insights feature. According to Twitter, “With audience insights, you can easily discover valuable insights about your followers and the people who have engaged with your organic Tweets. You can also identify new, relevant audiences to target for an upcoming campaign.” This is helpful information as marketers and community managers regularly want to understand the mindset of their target audience so as to deliver the type of relevant content that generates leads and converts followers to customers. Furthermore, as marketers we understand the value of analyzing our marketing strategy so as to know what’s working and what’s not. Audience Insights is another piece of the puzzle that gets us one step closer to really understanding the needs and interests of our target customer.

The graphic below gives a quick visual shot of the type of information Audience Insights can tell us about Twitter users:

Twitter also explains, “you can use this tool to learn about your potential customers on Twitter — the beauty products they’ve recently purchased, what fashion trends they’re interested in and even TV viewing behavior.”

Before we go any further, it might be helpful for you to go to ads.twitter.com, log in with your Twitter information and select “Audience Insights” from the “Analytics” tab.

If you poke around here for a little while, you can find a lot of data both about Twitter users in general, and specific information about your Twitter followers. Here’s a quick list of the various pieces of data about Twitter Users that I was able to view by using the new Twitter Audience Insights feature:

1. Interests

2. Household income

3. Occupation

4. Buying styles

5. Education

6. Marital status

7. Home type and value

8. Charitable donation preferences

9. TV genres

10. Consumer goods purchased

11. Wireless carriers

AND our followers’

12. Top interests and overall interests

13. Male-to-female ratio

14. Demographics—gender, age, country, region, language

15. Device categories—iOS, Android, Blackberry, etc.

So what do marketers do with this information? Why is it helpful to know consumer buying habits, what kinds of homes people live in, where they donate their money, what goods they’ve purchased, etc.? Well, if you’re using Twitter ads, this information can help you identify the best segments to target within your Twitter Ads. The more you know about the habits and preferences of your target audience, the more you can customize your ad to appeal to the Twitter users you want to gain as customers. This approach is at the very heart of a successful social media sales campaign and ensuring a positive return on investment (ROI).

Also, using Audience Insights can help marketers to understand the type of content that resonates with their followers so as to continue to keeping the audience interested and engaged. As Twitter explains, “You can also use Audience Insights to learn more about your followers and the people who engage with your Tweets, and then tailor your targeting and content accordingly. For instance, if you’re an app developer and see that the majority of your followers use an iPhone, you can make sure your rich media is tailored for that device.”

In order to see Audience Insights about your followers, choose “Followers” from the “Analytics” tab in ads.twitter.com.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one other important tip: from ad.twitter.com, you can choose “Tweet Activity” from the “Analytics” dropdown and see even more analytics on your tweets such as top tweets, top media tweets, impressions, engagement rate, follower growth, and more.

Audience Insights is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users—Yay! So there is no waiting needed to take advantage of this valuable information. Enjoy and happy (and successful) Tweeting!